Saint-Gaudens’s three years of study in Paris came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. He left for Rome in late 1870 and soon began “Hiawatha,” his first full-length statue, inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855). Seated on a rock in a contemplative pose, with his quiver of arrows and bow nearby, the Chippewa chief is “pondering, musing in the forest /On the welfare of his people,” as an excerpt from Longfellow’s poem inscribed on the base declares. Saint-Gaudens worked only briefly in such a romanticized Neoclassical manner before progressing to the fluid Beaux-Arts style of his innovative bronze monuments and low-relief portraits.